Russain Biomedical Agency names legitimate substitute for meldonium

Meldonium was included in WADA’s blacklist on January 1, 2016

ST. PETERSBURG, June 1. /TASS/. Russia’s Federal Biomedical Agency (FBA) has decided that Russian athletes will use L-Carnitine instead of Meldonium, FBA deputy head Yulia Miroshnikova told TASS on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

FBA head Vladimir Uiba said earlier that a substitute had been found for Meldonium, which was banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

Meldonium was included in WADA’s blacklist on January 1, 2016.

However, since the beginning of 2016, doping samples of nearly 300 athletes were found to contain Meldonium, which led WADA to publish the interim results of a survey concerning the time it takes to get Meldonium out of the human body system. As a result, most of the Russian and foreign athletes were cleared. WADA later decided that the concentration of less than one microgram of Meldonium per milliliter in a doping sample taken before March 1, 2016, was acceptable.

In September 2016, WADA issued the 2017 list of prohibited substances which specifically contains Meldonium.